The Economics Of Hurling

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David Reidy of Clare celebrates after scoring his side's second goal during the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Round 1 match between Clare and Cork at Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg in Ennis, Clare. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile.

That old sporting canard that there's no such thing as a safe lead in hurling was doing the rounds again after Cork and Clare got the Munster Hurling Championship off to a flier in Ennis three weekends ago.

It says a lot about how we view the game that there was no real shock about how Cork conspired to let a 12-point half-time lead slip and were perhaps fortunate to ultimately snatch a draw with the last puck of the game.

We have an image of hurling as being a sport of beautiful chaos where these sort of wild swings in matches are par for the course, but that's not the case.

Clare's comeback against Cork that day was only the second time in the last six years that a team has come from so far behind in championship hurling.

That information comes courtesy of former Cork hurler, Dr. John Considine, who is a lecturer on Economic Decision Making and the Law and Economics of Competition at the Cork University Business School at UCC.

He along, with co-authors from UCC and Croke park (John Eakins, Peter Horgan and Conor Weir), produced a study quantifying the changes in 'Game States' (the ahead/behind/level state of games) of all 163 senior inter-county hurling championship matches over the last six years (2019 to 2024) and how these fluctuations impact the overall game narrative and scoring.